199: Anna Aubuchon: Moving BI workloads into LLMs and using AI to build what you used to buy

What’s up everyone, today we have the pleasure of sitting down with Anna Aubuchon, VP of Operations at Civic Technologies.

• (00:00) - Intro
• (01:15) - In This Episode
• (04:15) - How AI Flipped the Build Versus Buy Decision
• (07:13) - Redrawing What “Complex” Means
• (12:20) - Why In House AI Provides Better Economics And Control
• (15:33) - How to Treat AI as an Insourcing Engine
• (21:02) - Moving BI Workloads Out of Dashboards and Into LLMs
• (31:37) - Guardrails That Keep AI Querying Accurate
• (38:18) - Using Role Based AI Guardrails Across MCP Servers
• (44:43) - Ops People are Creators of Systems Rather Than Maintainers of Them
• (48:12) - Why Natural Language AI Lowers the Barrier for First-Time Builders
• (52:31) - Technical Literacy Requirements for Next Generation Operators
• (56:46) - Why Creative Practice Strengthens Operational Leadership

Summary: AI has reshaped how operators work, and Anna lays out that shift with the clarity of someone who has rebuilt real systems under pressure. She breaks down how old build versus buy habits hold teams back, how yearly AI contracts quietly drain momentum, and how modern integrations let operators assemble powerful workflows without engineering bottlenecks. She contrasts scattered one-off AI tools with the speed that comes from shared patterns that spread across teams. Her biggest story lands hard. Civic replaced slow dashboards and long queues with orchestration that pulls every system into one conversational layer, letting people get answers in minutes instead of mornings. That speed created nerves around sensitive identity data, but tight guardrails kept the team safe without slowing anything down. Anna ends by pushing operators to think like system designers, not tool babysitters, and to build with the same clarity her daughter uses when she describes exactly what she wants and watches the system take shape.

About Anna

Anna Aubuchon is an operations executive with 15+ years building and scaling teams across fintech, blockchain, and AI. As VP of Operations at Civic Technologies, she oversees support, sales, business operations, product operations, and analytics, anchoring the company’s growth and performance systems.

She has led blockchain operations since 2014 and built cross-functional programs that moved companies from early-stage complexity into stable, scalable execution. Her earlier roles at Gyft and Thomson Reuters focused on commercial operations, enterprise migrations, and global team leadership, supporting revenue retention and major process modernization efforts.

How AI Flipped the Build Versus Buy Decision

AI tooling has shifted so quickly that many teams are still making decisions with a playbook written for a different era. Anna explains that the build versus buy framework people lean on carries assumptions that no longer match the tool landscape. She sees operators buying AI products out of habit, even when internal builds have become faster, cheaper, and easier to maintain. She connects that hesitation to outdated mental models rather than actual technical blockers.

AI platforms keep rolling out features that shrink the amount of engineering needed to assemble sophisticated workflows. Anna names the layers that changed this dynamic. System integrations through MCP act as glue for data movement. Tools like n8n and Lindy give ops teams workflow automation without needing to file tickets. Then ChatGPT Agents and Cloud Skills launched with prebuilt capabilities that behave like Lego pieces for internal systems. Direct LLM access removed the fear around infrastructure that used to intimidate nontechnical teams. She describes the overall effect as a compression of technical overhead that once justified buying expensive tools.

She uses Civic’s analytics stack to illustrate how she thinks about the decision. Analytics drives the company’s ability to answer questions quickly, and modern integrations kept the build path light. Her team built the system because it reinforced a core competency. She compares that with an AI support bot that would need to handle very different audiences with changing expectations across multiple channels. She describes that work as high domain complexity that demands constant tuning, and the build cost would outweigh the value. Her team bought that piece. She grounds everything in two filters that guide her decisions: core competency and domain complexity.

Anna also calls out a cultural pattern that slows AI adoption. Teams buy AI tools individually and create isolated pockets of automation. She wants teams to treat AI workflows as shared assets. She sees momentum building when one group experiments with a workflow and others borrow, extend, or remix it. She believes this turns AI adoption into a group habit rather than scattered personal experiments. She highlights the value of shared patterns because they create a repeatable way for teams to test ideas without rebuilding from scratch.

She closes by urging operators to update their decision cycle. Tooling is evolving at a pace that makes six month old assumptions feel stale. She wants teams to revisit build versus buy questions frequently and to treat modern tools as a prompt to redraw boundaries rather than defend old ones. She frames it as an ongoing practice rather than a one time decision.

Key takeaway: Reassess your build versus buy decisions every quarter by measuring two factors. First, identify whether the workflow strengthens a core competency that deserves internal ownership. Second, gauge the domain complexity and decide whether the function needs constant tuning or specialized expertise. Use modern integration layers, workflow builders, and direct LLM access to assemble internal systems quickly. Build the pieces that reinforce your strengths, buy the pieces that demand specialized depth, and share internal workflows so other teams can expand your progress.

Why In House AI Provides Better Economics And Control

AI tooling has grown into a marketplace crowded with vendors who promise intelligence, automation, and instant transformation. Anna watches teams fall into these patterns with surprising ease. Many of the tools on the market run the same public models under new branding, yet buyers often assume they are purchasing deeply specialized systems trained on inaccessible data. She laughs about driving down the 101 and seeing AI billboards every few minutes, each one selling a glossy shortcut to operational excellence. The overcrowding makes teams feel like they should buy something simply because everyone else is buying something, and that instinct shifts AI procurement from a strategic decision into a reflex.

"A one year agreement might as well be a decade in AI right now."

Anna has seen how annual vendor contracts slow companies down. The moment a team commits to a year long agreement, the urgency to evaluate alternatives vanishes. They adopt a “set it and forget it” mindset because the tool is already purchased, the budget is already allocated, and the contract already sits in legal. AI development moves fast. Contract cycles do not. That mismatch creates friction that becomes expensive, especially when new models launch every few weeks and outperform the ones you purchased only months earlier. Teams do not always notice the cost of stagnation because it creeps in quietly.

Anna lays out a practical build versus buy framework. Teams should inspect whether the capability touches their core competency, their customer experience, or their strategic distinctiveness. If it does, then in house AI provides more long term value. It lets the company shape the model around real customer patterns. It keeps experimentation in motion instead...